Catullus 85

In another forum, Hope reminds us of the timelessness of experience.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why does this happen, perhaps you ask?
I know not, but I know that it happens and I am tortured.

Catullus lived and loved and wrote in the first century before Christ.

The modern scholarly resource Wikipedia notes that Anakreon laid down a similar riff four centuries earlier.

I love and yet I do not love,
I am crazy and I am not crazy.

This is exactly what I've been saying. I've been saying I'm crazy, that I love, that I don't love, that all this trouble stems from actually being sane.

It ain't workin'.

I wrote a lot more and deleted it. It suffices to say I must be crazy. The poets say so.

Short Post in Celebration of Life

I'm pretty much hating on life these days -- all of it is entirely my own fault, and knowing that does wonders for my mood -- so I'm following the advice Roy gave awhile ago to just blog a little every day. Makes me feel better, somehow. Even just a little bit. Not that this will improve my writing. But surely it can't make it worse.

I want to know what the expected outcome is of being married a long time. Through both the internet and actual real conversations with actual real people, I've seen that there is a lot of ambivalence out there. People, both sexes, not really excited about who they're devoted to, but it's too god damn much trouble to make a change. Now, the dumb ones, who think they're clever, go and explore and have affairs and get caught and wind up in the shit, and if they're well-known and powerful they make the news and we all get a laugh. But the rest of us don't act up like that, we just sort of live the habits and accommodations and look up once in awhile to notice, wow, another year has gone by, fancy that.

I'm struggling because on the one hand, I'm sick of living a half-ass life, and though I married someone who never lives her life half-ass -- in fact, she pretty much kicks ass, every day -- I can't just flip a switch and start wanting to be full-ass specifically with her. No: Ambivalence; and a long history; and way too much shit boiling up from the state of our lives when we got together as well as from all the years before, dating right back to when I was a one year old. Seriously. All those long arcs of personal history are converging to this point, focused like sunlight through a lens, and that intense light beam is slowly but surely lighting the fuse.

Sort of a crisis that strikes at mid life. That's why they call it a, erm, you know. But what I'm wanting to know is, what do all the other poor saps (and sapettes) do? Right, some go off. Maybe I will too, at least something happens. Some (men particularly) push it deep inside where it twists around and they wind up being seriously outlived by their wives. Some manage to look (at least outwardly) quite happy. Typically those are men of faith. That fact bugs the shit out of me.

I understand faith. I understand it as a form of mental organization that human beings evolved as a means to survive. More accurately put (because too often, evolution is described backwards, as if changes are adaptations when in fact they are accidents that happened to turn out as advantages), the mutation that allows for faith and god and all that provided a psychological advantage that, in the unforgiving primal forest, led to more successful reproduction. So we all have it. I just don't choose to use it. Faith is like fire with all its risks and benefits, but now that we have central heating, why set part of your house on fire just to keep warm?

Yet there they are: Men of faith who have defined and narrowed (or maybe broadened, wtf do I know) their lives and found their bliss is in what they've spent the past couple three decades building. Well. BULLY FOR THEM.

I have to get back to work but my whole hating on life point is that this conundrum and a number of related side issues that I'm not going into here have me so distracted that my job performance sucks which only makes things worse and I'm supposed to feel better now that I've written it out and done so publicly. Yeah.

In Which I Ramble On While Hiding Away In A Random Unused Cubicle

Yes, there are tales of Burning Man in the oven, but they are slow going. Mostly because I am slow going. Like most men I don't handle being sick very well. For ex, last night, after a long and (I thought) fairly pointless telephone conference with a customer in Tokyo, I came home so wiped all I could do was nuke some old pizza and crash. The good news: I may have slept ten or eleven hours. The bad: Though I needed the sleep, today I'm not any better. So my brain remains a fairly useless organ, and that's not always bad news if some other organ rises to fill the gap, but alas these days it is my brain and no other that is needed most.

Some of that writing got done on the trip this past weekend, bouncing down I-5 in the back seat of our crew-cab pickup. It was an environment. I've read that more often than not, in order to be productive a writer must create a space to exercise his craft. For me this is certainly true; and it's typical that I've responded to this requirement by doing nothing about it. I have nowhere at home to write. No one's fault but mine, I hasten to add, and now that our number of at-home children has been cut in half I have even fewer excuses. I look forward to fixing that, once I get this done ... and that ... and the other thing ...

Lately I've been daydreaming to distraction about the open road. It seems I want nothing so much as to just hit the highway, with a reasonably dependable car, my little netbook for travel-blogging, and sufficient funds. What funds would be sufficient? I don't know. I hate to spend money on lodging if all I'm going to do is sleep but it seems unavoidable. I would camp a lot to save money. Crash on dark unpatrolled side roads (the Mz and I used to camp in random locations when we were young, it was fun AND free). I don't eat a lot. Maybe I wouldn't need so much. Really, I don't know. Probably the adventure would devolve to hitchhiking and taking buses. Possibly you would never hear from me again. I am quite looking forward to it. Maybe next year I will find a way to make it happen.

Of course, that's false. I would get lonely, and then I would get tired of it all, and then I would go home again. I predict three, four weeks.

I would visit friends, however, friends made via the internet, old friends from school, as well as my cousin, and my brother. Actually, no, I wouldn't get lonely. Not right away.

The meat of such daydreaming remains unwritten. Given the nature of daydreams, that's appropriate.

This open-road daydreaming is a direct response to driving nine hundred ninety nine miles this past weekend, down to the dark side of the state and back. A lot of folks hate I-5 because it goes on for hundreds of miles with little to look at. But all that does for me is make me want more. Not necessarily more of nothing to look at. But there is so much world out there, and so many people in it. Every single person has a story, and every little place too. Everywhere you turn, everywhere you look was the defining space at some moment for some life somewhere; a place of birth or death, of unexpected sex or romance or drama or pain, of hours and hours of brutal life-changing labor. I see worn old scars along the hillside and wonder about the men who spent years making those scars in the course of their lives, lives spent scratching a living the best way the knew how, herding and fencing cattle, building flumes and canals, planting orchards only to find a decade later that the climate just wasn't right for it. The remnants of hay barns, of houses, of dormitories for migrant farm workers long since converted to one-night shelters for itinerant homeless families; and rest stops.

Deep in my distraction I read about rest stops. The state puts these up along the freeways. We've all used them. They're bloody necessary when one is driving for hours and hours. They are also homeless shelters of a sort. Some of the larger ones, it is alleged, are home for entire families living in, say, a camper van that they move every few days while they live off the largesse of other travelers. At our last stop a lady asked for gas money. I said I had no cash. Frankly, if you are in your fifties, you need to have run your life a wee bit better than to depend on guilt-ridden strangers who never learned not to feed the animals, as it were. Sorry, but cold truth: I don't believe in encouraging and enabling destructive behaviors. We are all better than that. And yet it pains me, especially when there are children involved. The world is a huge and very cold place if you are not so fortunate as the rest of us, the rest of us who had a role model or a parent or some means of support while growing into adulthood. Honestly, I've always felt a kinship with the homeless, a kinship yet to be explored and explained. This kinship does not make me more charitable: The homeless are fellow human beings to me, and not merely opportunities for giving. The fact that I get to eat when I want does not translate into a moral need or directive to "give". I see them much more deeply than that, and (this is weird, perhaps) have always felt but a couple of steps away from being one of them myself. Does this explain my less merciful attitude, the fact that I don't see a fence between them and myself? Perhaps subconsciously I see giving to panhandlers as akin to giving myself a break thoroughly undeserved, and every bit as harmful. I don't know, like I said, this is largely unexplored.

I have thought of spending my next extended vacation partially immersed in that world. Talking to people, serving in kitchens, living as though I don't have a credit card and a bank account and can escape whenever I want. Slumming, you call it, and to many it is thoroughly despicable, an opportunity to see how much "better" we are than others, to get insight into how those others somehow "deserve" their unhappy state. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe you're right. In honesty I can't say what my motives really would be.

There is research, of course. One of my reasons for wanting to experience everything is so I can write about it with authority. Imagination is fine, but we've all read novels where the novel situation just doesn't ring true, and others where it does. The difference isn't just in the author's skill. You can tell if he's ever been there, and if he has not. And thanks to life's opportunities, I've been here and there and I have worked those experiences into (NaNoWriMo mainly) attempts at story-telling. But there's more, always so much more.

And if I have to choose between experiencing life and writing about it, I will choose the experience. Let some other poor sod who sits all day do the writing, if that's what it takes.

All right, enough hiding, I'll go back to work now.

Jeez, Peeps

Don't panic. I said nothing I wouldn't have said a month or a year ago if I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and didn't care what anyone thought. Mostly tired of watching what I say here. So here's the word: This is a blog, which means it isn't true, except when it is, which means that it isn't. I will be passive-aggressive enough to delete it, though, if anyone I'm related to mentions it to my face.

I'm weird like that.

So we're on the cusp of a major milestone, the younger kid being set to enter dorm life this weekend, and us the loving parents driving him down tomorrow to make it happen. For years and years this has been the milestone before which no decision can be made, no matter what. But no: Hey, we did our job. Parenting's first stage is well and truly done. We can do what we want! Especially if that means get divorced! Yay!

But what if we don't? Will you be disappointed?

The other day, or some day other than that, I don't know, I got analytical about why we stuck it out this long. One, we love each other. Duh. A pretty good pairing. But I've done some stupid shit, and some of it she knows about. She's pulled her pranks too, though I'll be the first to admit none of them were deal-breakers, just fucking annoying consequences of having her personality. So no one's perfect, yet even so I sometimes wondered why I was unable to get within miles of considering a split. I decided it was about passion: I'm impassioned about parents sticking together. Somehow the experience of parents divorcing when I was four coupled with a childhood in which both of them found that ignoring or being ignorant of their responsibilities was a lot easier than actually raising their children (right, this is one of those annoying spoiled yuppie moments where the self-hating "adult" blames it all on his now elderly parents who actually did the best they knew how to do), all that, once understood by having my own parenting experience, led me to a point such that it was simply impossible to do to mine what was done to me, and we stuck it out, and here we are:

Too old to move on, too young to settle.

Thus the dice remain in the air where they've flown for years now. The difference really is that our youngest is an adult now and about to spend the rest of his life living elsewhere. The psychobabblish effect this has on our attitude (well, mine) is immense. I really don't know what's next, I don't always care, but sometimes I do, and most of all it needs writing about. This is very likely the wrong place for it but, once again, with feeling: I don't give a shit.

And so your visit isn't a total loss, here is a recent photograph that nicely summarizes the subject matter.

Dazed, Confused, So On

I am deeply dazed and confused. It seems my job is nearly incomprehensible to me, even though it has become easier and simpler in recent months. It seems my wife is almost complete in her conviction that our marriage has run its course. It seems I am unable to develop any sort of cogent counter-position. It seems I lost ten pounds at the Burn and subsequent illness and am only getting soft and weak as I gain them back. It seems I've had the same headache since I was in a semi-dehydrated state in Nevada two weeks ago. It seems any ability I may once have had to focus on anything that needs doing has left the station for good. It seems my kids know I am on the verge of an explosion yet behave towards me as if everything is completely normal. It seems long-understood concepts of normal living are now grown foreign, and having a job and a place to live or not having a job and a place to live look to me the same. I don't want to alarm anyone, but this isn't the sort of thing you put on Facebook (which I slowly but steadily grow less interested in) or keep to yourself or hide away in a journal if in fact you are trying to quit journaling, so, yeah.

Here's an unrelated or only partially related note that has been on my mind and might as well get noted down here: If you know me personally, I would appreciate it if you never mention that you read this here blog. As a sporadic public diary, it does not exist to provide fuel for polite conversation. It exists in a world of its own, and any and all feedback must occur within that world, i.e. within comments. Whenever someone I know says, "I read your blog ..." I feel an immediate desire to find it and set fire to it and crush the ashes until there is no more evidence that it ever existed. Of course, it being on a Blogger server, that's impossible, and deleting it strikes me as a misguided over-reaction, so typically I forget about it until the next annoying mention. And the next, and so on, so nix on that, here's a note instead. Don't mention it.

You wonder why it's over. I wonder why it wouldn't be, even though I love my wife and want her happy. Loving someone and wanting them happy is a far cry from sincerely desiring their company in every circumstance, and since I don't know what long-term marriages are built on, I don't know what else there is to focus on. Not real charmed at the idea of being an old couple that comfortably ages forward because they've made a good life and can now cruise with it awhile. Lack of passion is lack of life. I've never known an old couple that was happy, barring Art and ML of recent mention, and frankly I wondered about them too, countless times over the past few decades of observation. Besides, I've dropped broad hints in the company of numerous females that things are not what they seem and though I never meant to start anything (nor did I) I'm pretty tired of such half-ass vicarious attempts at adding interest to life. As I've said to Herself, it makes more sense to me than anything to take this midpoint in life, rake it all into a pile, and set it on fire. People who've had this done to them, people who've done it, and people who's lives took a sharp turn simply because they were unable to prevent it all look to me about as happy as the long married couples -- which isn't to say much. Indeed, after we've hit fifty or so and our offspring are in theory able to support themselves, evolution provides no more useful capability or purpose, and frankly I don't think it matters any more what we do. The dice are in hand.

Healthy Trend

I also call it the Facebook Effect.

Social networking is all the rage now. Bloggers are getting their faux friendship fix on Facebook, and the blogs are drying up. Twitter is the big thing -- next year I'm hoping it will be last year's big thing -- such that idiot twittering congressmen made the news at the Inauguration, every celebrity has a flunky managing his tweet equity, and even news radio takes it as having a given value. Capital Public Radio (local NPR affiliate) ran a piece this morning about the attorney general or state comptroller or some such official, and closed their report by saying, "And, he tweets!"

Fuck.

(By tweet equity I mean something akin to brand equity. I take that as being self-explanatory.)

Fuck, again. Tell you what: I'm going to knock down all the cell phone towers and crash all the Wi-Fi networks just to watch you people squirm. Fair enough?

I guess the final straw for me is when bloggers blog about twittering. I mean, I understand using a fake interaction medium such as this to write about real stuff (family, writing, photography, life), or about unreal stuff (politics), or about virtual stuff (other blogs). But when we blog about tweeting or tweet about blogging the overload of fakeness, the confluence and merging of twin rivers of nothingness, it just kills me. Reminds me of that Dilbert cartoon when he was reading -- reading the manual for his new computer golf game -- reading a description of a pretend version of an activity that is almost a sport. I dunno. It's like drinking non-alcohol lite beer to me, only much worse.

So. I tried Twitter for a couple weeks and then killed my account. I do Facebook because it's easy and there are non-bloggers there and, like I said, it's the current place for our faux friendship fix. I blog less but not just because of Facebook, I really am online less, or I'm a lot less interactive anyway. I'm actually online a lot thanks to this crazy job.

Segue!

Crazy online job right now! I am out on the porch swing, in darkness save for the glow of the LCD screen. A headset blares into my right ear, attached to my cell phone, through which I reached a local number that patches me into a meeting taking place in several geographies. Microsoft® Office Live Meeting fills my screen with presentations and notes, and minutes being typed by a team lead in Bangalore, talking to folks in Shanghai and in California, on subject matters far beyond my ken. I'm here to absorb it, a bench player, except I don't get the game. They're talking software stuff. I grok software to an extent -- I got my fucking Master's in it -- but really I hate the shit and besides, this isn't about development or anything cool and creative. It's all about some very involved and extraordinarily boring coordination of drivers, fixes, patches, and the schedules for validation and release of same.

I'd almost rather live in poverty. The Padre seems happy enough.

(You know who I mean, or you don't.)

This whole online almost-friends thing started for me in Usenet. No, it started in dialing up local BBSs. No, online debates started there. Then moved to Usenet where I got to know real people, many of whom are truly the cat's pajamas. Friends, okay, but we never met. And then I found the interaction took way too much time and energy. Quit Usenet completely. Should say I've been backing out ever since but no, blogs had (still have) potential for some great creative expression and interaction. Some blogs express genius at that. Wanted for awhile to pull something genius off too, but the focus / energy aren't there. So, you get this. And posts and traffic are backing off. Like I said, a healthy trend.

There's a cat rubbing against my legs.

Cabeza

Recently somewhere else I said I needed to quit the online life. There are good reasons for that. Very good reasons. Maybe someday I'll write a blog post about it.

Not today. The online world is still good for a few things. Yesterday afternoon as I ambled slowly back to the office after being dismissed from jury duty -- I was dismissed for good reason, and ambled very slowly -- I stopped at Borders and browsed History and found a book that told me about the amazing adventure of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. The early years of European exploration of the outer world are fascinating, not least for the aura of magic and wonder that surrounds every account. This one attracted me not only on its own merits but the time and place provide for a fanciful connection with an idea I've been percolating for some time in the way of historical fiction. Wanting to know more, I looked him up today on the web, and found someone made a movie. Reading a review of the movie, it's fairly clear that my standards for accuracy in historical fiction are ridiculously high. I'll keep to them anyway.

This was supposed to show that the online world is still good for something. It does not. All of this would be more effectively pursued with pencil and notepad at the library. All right then. Adios. And yes, up top, that was an attempt at humor.

Or Is It Freedom

Sometimes this deadly shyness hits me like a bomb. I know a fair amount of people now, but few of them well, and if it weren’t for the random associations of the workplace and of my kids’ rapidly disappearing family-related activities, I have the strong potential to know no one at all. I hate the shyness. I despise it. It is part of a broader sort of brokenness that stands between me and the rest of humanity, an Olduvai Gorge that has me more often than not watching the floor as I walk, watching potential acquaintances remain strangers, watching potential friends remain acquaintances, and watching friends evolve back into being strangers.

I fake it pretty well, though the fake-out is not sustainable. My 50th birthday party was a success, and certainly everyone got the impression I had a lot of friends. It was no doubt a surprise to all of them. I know it was to me. But I gather most folks have an instinct to remain in touch somehow, to manage all those relationships such that they remain alive and breathing, and it is that sort of social management that entirely escapes me. Not the mechanics of it – it’s child’s play to write down a list of things one should do. It’s the instinct that is missing, or that is too weak to overcome the fear.

What the fear is of, I can’t say, but if you are a shy person, you already know as well as me.

So anyway, the bomb hits when I realize that my instincts to focus on my own work and not make continual little investments in human relationships not only augurs a life that will never be a less lonely one, but is the number one reason why my career has never really taken off. Yes, I’ve raised a family, have a good house, got to travel the world a little on the company dollar, might even be able to put the boys through college. All of that is good stuff for which I am thankful. But that’s about the limit of it. In this competitive industry, staying on track and going fast enough to avoid being run over by the train still isn’t enough. Taking the long view, if further contractions and other workplace turmoil costs me my position, the ultimate cause clearly will not be from being less valuable through misbehavior, insufficient smarts, or lack of productivity. It’s a given that one should get mustered out for any of those. If I am vulnerable it is because, just as in the social context, I am not plugged in to the crowd. I don’t swim with the school. When in amongst the herd I either edge to the outskirts or keep my head down in the grasses. People don't always know what I really do, therefore, and that alone is recognized as a weakness. This lack of managing impressions allows for poor impressions where a whole lot of solid and valuable work may not be so visible.

The above is the sort of thing I write and then delete because it looks like a bunch of whining. This time I’ll post it instead because I’m brave like that, brave being another word for nothing left to lose.

Dragster Corpse

Funny how strongly we keep images.

I have a shitty memory and can barely remember what I was working on yesterday. Last September I came back from Burning Man with an overload of impressions and a dearth of coherent tales and memories. Yet all of it is stored -- I just can't extract it.

On our way through Gerlach at exactly the speed limit I looked out the driver side window and saw the remains of a dragster shoved against a fence. It was partially sunk into the ground and the color of dust, a relic of a bygone age. It was in my view for just a few seconds.

Seeing it again in Google street view brings it back again. This is exactly it. The rest of the roadway as well, recalled as if driven just this past weekend.


Wish I had this magic for life in general. Or even just a few important conversations.

Not off the rails just yet

F Market & Wharves, taken last weekend
They call it a midlife crisis and turn it into a joke about blondes and sports cars and gold necklaces but doesn't it really make perfect sense that after a half century of building a life, one would reach a point where revisiting the path is simply inescapable? No one has made it to fifty and not done as much. Many just do it quietly, and they use unemployment or empty nest or time to write as the new lens through which to refocus on the remaining life yet to build. I'll do that too, real soon. 2009 is the year for hope and change. The question, for all of us really, is after that leap into the dark, was it off the high dive, and is there any water in the pool?

Walls n Dolls

(Image © 2008 Bryan Dongray, used without permission but hey)

The wall hit me sometime yesterday morning. Or I hit the wall. But I wasn’t aware I was driving so it must have hit me. It was the wall between lives.

Over there is a real life. Over here a blog life. Down there a Facebook life. Also a LinkedIn life. Tried a MySpace life once but it was completely pointless. Second Life pissed me off, it was so stupid.

Blog life is for trapping occasional moments of brilliance. Drollery. Dumbery, whatever. Facebook for having a less coy link to friends and family so inclined. LinkedIn I maintain in case the 10% force reduction rumors that came out today turn out to be true. Not that there will be any jobs. But one has to give the appearance of trying.

Us irredeemable computer users with broken social lives are a funny lot.

Anyway I was having fun seeking out coworkers whom I’m kind of friends with who have Facebook lives. There are tens of thousands of people in the company, so browsing Facebook for a few I knew was sorta diverting. And I found a few. And I was going to go all friendly and happy and friends them and all that crap. And then I hit the wall.

Because there’s also Burning Man stuff on there. Whatever you’re into, if there are people in their thirties into it too, it will have a large and seriously programmed presence on the internet. And I saw myself on the verge of linking my Work friends with my Burn life and that set off a big loud proximity alarm.

Not that there isn’t a little overlap.

But I never told anyone I work with I went to Burning Man. I don’t need any of the people who have input into my job performance and job prospects and professional life in general picturing me in face paint and a clown wig and a pink tutu. No, I didn’t! But that’s sort of the image of the place. That and public sex (false) and unabashed nakedness (true) and an unconcerned indulgence in certain herbs and spices (um, yes).

It’s a lot more than that but the image in the minds of people who’ve given it between two and four minutes’ thought is not properly conducive to success in the corporate shark tank I swim in. Hence the separation. Hence the wall.

I hate that.

Reflections On Economic Uncertainty

I was talking to one of the other parents at Scouts. We’re old parents: Kids are teenagers (mine’s almost out), we can just sit and watch the boys run things. We were talking about economic uncertainty. He has several houses paid for, but he’s still got to put the kids through college, and he’s worried. Gave me a long explanation of what the government should do that went mostly over my head. (Sounded to me like McCain’s plan but I didn’t say anything – he was as likely to be an Obama supporter and I don’t like to inject politics). I mentioned that I know it’s irrational of me but I’m just not worried. So what if I lose my job? He asked me how long I’d been at IMC.

“Thirteen years.”

“So you have some seniority, how’s that work out there?”

“There’s no seniority.”

He did a double-take. “Say what?”

“Seniority means nothing. If the project you’re on is cancelled, you’re out.”

“What?” again.

“Seniority means you’ve had a chance to build up a network, have a better chance of finding another job in the two months they give you. You know more people, have some broad experience. Of course on the other hand, the younger guys are more into the technology, more energetic, cost less.”

“So I’ll see you at Wal-Mart.”

“Pretty much.”

And that’s my attitude. If the downturn effects my customers and they start cancelling programs, our future sales plummet, revenue dries up, staff shrinks, and let’s face it, I’m not exactly one of the stars around here. I bring my unique benefits to the organization as everyone does, but I don’t stand up and lead the charge, I’m not quick to grasp the implications when shit happens (and it does, daily), I’m not widely known as a brilliant technical mind who takes charge and gits er done. This Darwinian corporate atmosphere is low on oxygen for the likes of me.

And I care, don’t get me wrong, and it does keep me up at nights. But I’m fifty fuckin’ years old and though it’s easy to say you’re only as old as you feel and bah blah blah the fact of the matter is, all the personal changes I would need to make in order to survive in an even leaner and meaner organization than this one’s already become are just not interesting to me. Feck it, y’know?

Fortunately, no signs yet. We’re actually hiring, of all things. Our business is international in scope and if the U.S. takes a nose dive, we’re not so exposed. You just never know, and fortunes do turn on a dime, and the powers that be really are always looking for ways to shake things up. Periodically they have to give the aquarium a good shaking and see which fish swim to the top and which are still hiding down among the rocks. I think this is the psychological effect of my children being on the cusp of adulthood and independence and not really needing me anymore in a material sense, but it’s all the same to me.

I’ll see you at Wal-Mart.

Fleeting Moments of Meh

I would never have predicted this but my attitude about Burning Man right now is Been There Done That and the Decom next weekend just doesn’t tickle my fancy a whole lot. But that doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. I thought my gig at this stage in life was at least in part to bring out the inner dance art festival revelry guy, the inner hippie child, the emergent sage with the color in his beard and the twinkle in his eye and go grin in the fire dance firelight taking joy and bringing joy in more or less equal measures. Yes. Yes, that must be right. So what is this reluctance, this can’t be botheredness, this fleeting moment of meh that has my wife wondering how the hell she’s supposed to plan anything, huh? Huh?

An instant of laziness, that must be what it is, a momentary disinterest in San Francisco’s freezing cold fog and sea wind, but no. I’ve been there done that a thousand times and never tired of it, never, nor could I ever. There’s something else, there must be, and I know it isn’t the fact that I’m heartily sick and tired of smug long-haired Hippies Generation 2.0 with their hoodies and iPods and grayless beards and that youthful sense of entitlement that has annoyed crusty old fuckers like me since fifty years after the dawn of time, no, that ain’t it. Nor is it the gracefully aging New Agers with their sun-wrinkled faces glowing in the hard-won victorious recognition that here in the waning days of the Dark Age of Bush everything they’ve been saying about oil capitalism and the military state and its industrial complex is finally seen by everyone else to be true. No, no, they don’t bother me, I quit the GOP a year ago or so, I’m over that, yeah I am. Really. Nor am I annoyed by the forced smiles of people who were never There and are desperate to find just for a moment that sense of happiness and belonging they're sure would be theirs if only, if only, and suddenly it's up to me to let it happen. No, I don't have that bad an attitude. Nor am I in any way tweaked that to get to this thing I will have to a) wear some ridiculous costume of the sort I happily wore out in the desert but just am not in the right mind-state for here in the default world and b) will have to wear the damn thing while riding BART and other public transpo to get to this street faire somewhere south of Pac Bell Park. No, no, no … Memories of ridicule riding the bus to an SCA event when seventeen years old while wearing borrowed tights doesn’t play into that at all, no.

No. So, yeah. Just a fleeting moment of meh. There will be others but I’m sure we’ll probably go to this thing next weekend anyhow.

Sunday Sweep-out

So much sadness.

“Don’t you want to play with me anymore?”

No. You’re a video camera we bought in 1989. You broke when Sk8r dropped you in, I dunno, 2000. You were so much better than your replacement, better features, better quality. But you didn’t work anymore. Been in a box ever since.

No. You’re a cable box a friend of mine reprogrammed in 1993 so it would get the Playboy Channel. But after a few years the cable company sent a signal you couldn’t deal with and you didn’t work anymore. Been in a box ever since.

No. You’re a cell phone from the ‘90s. You’re a friggin’ brick with buttons. Been in a box-- Wait, you’re hella retro. Children in future years will be amused and amazed at your girth. Yes, you can stay.

A three-foot stack of stereo receivers with blown output amps or noisy balance controls, long-obsolete VHS video recorders, the CD player I bought my then-girlfriend now-wife in 1985, a VHS-C camera my dad passed down, and – OMG! – a pair of EPI speakers I bought off a chemist at the refinery I worked at in 1980.

Still alive, watching me sadly.

“Is it really time to go?”

“Yes, I think so. Don’t be scared.” I try to smile.

How do we manage to keep so much … stuff?

There’s an impulse. “It still works.” “It was cool once.” This stuff looks so … not broken. And yet. Does it really do us any good to keep it? Does it?

Got a scanner here: an ISA bus card with a little doodad that hooks onto the carriage of an Epson line printer. When it was made, Reagan was still president, and it’s been obsolete since Clinton’s first term at the very latest. Ridiculous.

So it’ll all go. Call some ewaste recycler or other to come pick it up. Lighten the load. It’s all good. So why does it almost make me sad? Something weird about unfulfilled potential? A need to use things until they are literally driven into the ground? Or did I see one too many stupid animations about cute robots and talking toasters abandoned like unwanted orphans when their families move away, and some stupid part of my brain wants to save everybody, even the inanimate? No matter. Out! Don’t be scared! Git!

But first, some cannibalism. I did have fun taking the old video camera apart. I wanted the lenses. Yes, fun! A screwdriver is all you need. Now the bits are in a box, and those lenses, well, they're still good. I’ll think of something.

I Know

I need to write more, a lot more, about Burning Man. I just can't seem to string two hours together to do it. I look forward to the challenge of communicating some impressions. It was an amazing experience. Not transformative, unfortunately. Maybe next time.

TMI: Evidently something I ate today really liked me. It wouldn't leave without a struggle.

I have a habit of defending certain strongly disliked conservatives. I hope this doesn't put off my more liberal friends. It happens because a) over the past decade and a half it has become crystal clear that the lovely human trait of bigotry respects no ideological boundaries and I am especially disappointed that so many self-described liberals have become so very bigoted, and b) of the more ridiculous opinions I usually only see the liberal side. If someone would point me to something worth ridiculing that was said of Obama/Biden I would be grateful for the chance to test my impartiality. Note the proviso "worth ridiculing". There are plenty of right wing sites I've literally zero time for. Both wings, really.

My father went home from the convalescent hospital today. Yay! He hadn't been home for four months. Continues on a slow and steady mend. I must say, getting old isn't for the weak.

Yes, more and more I want universal health care. Used to take a Darwinistic approach to society, heavily influenced by an Objectivist friend and my general (and well-founded) distrust of government programs. But apart from the alleged injustice of wealth (and health) disparity, the overall society and its individuals will do better, I think, if resources aren't squandered taking care of people only in their extremity and meanwhile denying them the health to be productive. Similar to how the South flourished with the end of Jim Crow, so the world should flourish if the inability to pay for treatment is removed as an obstacle to health and productivity.

While we're at it, marijuana should be legalized and gay marriage made an uncontroversial element among the many ways human adults bond together. And that probably about exhausts my cred as a liberal. Otherwise, I'm one of the few people who still admits the world would actually be a worse and more dangerous place if we had not interfered with Iraq when we did. Yes, shitloads of mistakes and so on, but I look at the big picture.

Oh, I'm a big supporter of public schools too. We ought to quintuple the funding. And disband the unions. And require parental involvement. And promote on capability. And fix the curriculum to be interesting and relevant. Easy peasy!

Now I'm rambling so that's enough. What did I start this poast about? I forget.

Color Me Out Again

This time I was relaxed, not at work, fed, listening to radio jazz, and remembered the instructions.

Don took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Needs a change in his circumstances or in his rela..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

The results are less interesting because they are kind of blah and generic compared to last time. But no less accurate. Just less dramatically accurate.

Comparison:

First time:
An existing situation or relationship is unsatisfactory, but he feels unable to change it to bring about the sense of belonging which he needs. Unwilling to expose his vulnerability, he therefore continues to resist this state of affairs, but feels dependent on the attachment. This not only depresses him, but makes him irritable and impatient, producing considerable restlessness and the urge to get away from the situation, either actually or, at least, mentally. Ability to concentrate may suffer.

Second time:
Wants to overcome a feeling of emptiness and to bridge the gap which he feels separates himself from others. Anxious to experience life in all its aspects, to explore all its possibilities, and to live it to the fullest. He therefore resents any restriction or limitation being imposed on him and insists on being free and unhampered.

Hmm. Those aren't so different. Probably all internet psychobabble boilerplate anyway. What is this, a new twist on the universal astrological readout? Now I feel cheated.

Color Me Out

Don took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Feels he has been unjustly and undeservedly treate..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

Here's the thing: I took this on a lark with no thought. Did not have instructions to follow. Just did what made sense at the time.

At first glance the results appear stunningly accurate -- at a second look, not quite so, but still an outstanding initial analysis. You only have to know when to interpret them as describing me as a husband and when as a child (yes, ladies, there is a difference). I should take it again when more relaxed and prepared in order to improve the results.

(Hat tip: Got it from David.)

L

Classic midlife. For whatever level of success the world yet holds, the die is cast. Long-since settled, bred, raised, trained, caught and released, and now going …

What?

And you may find yourself
in a beautiful house
with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
Well...
How did I get here?

Next? A peculiar longing is the sloping beach, a crisis of identity the undertow. The bairns are raised, I can swim …

But …

Walked this strand for awhile now. On one hand, the land and people I love. On the other …

… the endless immensity of the sea.

But …

By itself, a half century is nothing. Something has to happen, is all. And it will. The question is …

What?

(Meanwhile a trifling, foolish record of my fiftyishness)

A Little Man on the Street Carving Carrots

Last year I wandered alone in a far city, thinking lots of little thoughts, mostly about being alone. I liked being alone and I hated being alone. I liked that I could go left and right and stop and go and not have to talk or negotiate or even think about it, I could just do it. I stopped for food on a whim and browsed a bookstore and took a zillion pictures of an old brick castle and had no need to make it fun for someone else or engage in witty repartee or speed up or slow down or anything. It was great. I hated it. I was in Milan, and I was all alone.


Lots of attractive people there. Lots of pretty women, and I was all by myself. This is what you think about under such circumstances. There they are –- here you are. Forever divided, a little by language, perhaps by culture or at least social instinct –- meeting people in a foreign city is not the same as at a neighborhood barbecue –- somewhat by age, certainly by wedding ring … But largely by the division I have always had between myself and the rest of humanity. I know there are people who make friends wherever they go. I’m not one of them. I wish I was. I may yet learn.

So I walked for miles and miles and miles. African men in the Piazza del Duomo tried to sell me stuff. Young people from Forza Nuova handed out flyers with demands to blocco immigrazione while the Hare Krishna clanged by. A well-dressed man stood in front of a store empty but for racks and racks of full-length fur coats. Crowds flowed this way and that, doing all the things the Milanese do between work and supper, mostly shopping by the look of it. I wore my anonymity suit and observed, eyes wide and darting. Sometimes other eyes would look back, and there’d be a moment. A moment, gone. I always forget to smile. Fat lot of good it would do anyway.


I wandered away from the tourist and shopping zone, out to the real streets. There was a wonderful time after dark fell. People bustled about doing their marketing, walking purposefully from shop to shop, trains rattling by between hurrying cars and motorcycles. I hadn't eaten for hours and the rain began to fall and I only had a light fleece jacket, my feet hurt, my back hurt, it was after dark, I had no idea where I was and wouldn’t have been anywhere else for anything.

You can really think at times like that. When far from any person or place you know, everything that is your life is placed into perspective. Important stuff –- my marriage, my career -– things too big to see up close, they became strangely clear to me then. I knew that what I was doing was mostly good, and what wasn’t good could be changed. I even had ideas on how to make those changes. I thought of writing projects, too, and of creative endeavors generally -– snippets of musical arrangement, of fictional dialog. For a short while the evening coalesced into a unified sphere -– an outer shell made up of faces passing by in the trolley cars and restaurant windows, heels on the sidewalk, a Moto Guzzi sliding expertly on wet pavement, a little man on the street carving carrots; and an inner core where everything that was my life found ways to fit together and finally make sense.


That didn’t last long. By the time I realized my innate sense of direction was not leading me back to Stazione Cadorna, I had to urinate like a race horse. The few signs pointing towards public toilets contradicted one another. The geography became all confusion and my lower back whispered of forgotten baseball bats. More walking and a desperate duck into a small hotel to ask the concierge for directions sorted all that out but by then, the unity and the sense achieved earlier was medieval history.

Well, my thoughts are ephemeral, and most of my ideas too. Better I suppose to have thought and lost, than never to have thought at all. I really am just a little man on the street carving carrots, and really, it doesn’t matter.